Tiger Woods Scores Big for NBCSports.com

Buy whomever decided to livestream yesterday’s epic finale of the U.S. Open a frosty Pabst Blue Ribbon. Tiger Woods’ nail-biting victory gave NBCSports.com its highest-trafficked day ever, with more than 9.1 million page views, more than 2 million unique users and over 1.5 million video streams that averaged more than 17 minutes(!) per use.

Live sports are often touted as a reason to cling to your oldteevee, but with all of yesterday’s action taking place while people were at work, the TV set wasn’t an option. There were a few technical hiccups, but this was an unplanned event as the tournament was supposed to end on Sunday. Yesterday’s online performance — and audience — bodes well for watching NBC’s upcoming coverage of the Summer Olympics on the web.

ESPN and the U.S. Golf Association also livestreamed the event. We’re checking in with them to get their stats and will update as soon as we get the numbers.

UPDATE: Ummm… We might want to upgrade that celebratory drink from a PBR to something classy, like MGD. Just got some numbers from USGA.org, and they are even more impressive.

Keep in mind that these are early figures. A USGA rep told me that they are bound to be bigger once they get the official stats, but here’s how the USGAUSOpen.com site did during the U.S. Open playoff yesterday:

600,000 concurrent users at its peak

2.5 million streams

3.5 million unique visitors, 16 million pageviews visits for the entire site

And this was just for the (roughly) four hour live portion of the finals.

USGA didn’t have any time length per visit stat, but the rep said that during the tournament on Thursday and Friday of last week, the site generated 1.2 million streams with 85,000 concurrent users at its peak, with the average user spending 2.5 hours on the site.

For some sporting perspective, CBS said it got 4.8 million unique visitors for its streaming of the March Madness playoffs. NBC and the USGA combined got roughly 5.5 million in one day (though, admittedly there could be some overlap as people switched from one player to the other).

UPDATE 2: Another big winner from yesterday? American Express. While no revenue figures were disclosed, AMEX was one of four corporate partners that got exclusive marketing rights for the tournament. AMEX chose to focus on the video streaming as one of its primary tactics, getting a fifteen second pre-roll that ran in front of every one of the 2.5 million streams.

We’ve contacted NBC for any initial ad impression / revenue figures, but have not heard back. There was some chatter online about the network’s ads not working properly yesterday.